MELIN HEADWEAR — CAPSULE COLLECTIONS
Trim & Patch Design · Slogan

The Challenge:
Melin doesn't make ball caps. They make the first thing anyone sees when they look at your face, a billboard for who you are before you've said a word. I came on in 2021 to design multiple capsule collections: elevate the work, push the design, and never once lose the core customer who already trusts the brand. The catch is the canvas. Most of these designs live or die as a rubberized PVC patch, and a PVC patch is a medium with hard rules, it executes beautifully at scale, but only if you actually understand what it can and can't do.

The Insight:
The constraint is the design. You don't fight the medium, you design from it. Knowing exactly how a rubberized patch holds a line, drops a detail, or reads at an inch tall is the whole game, it's the difference between a graphic that looks great on screen and one that looks great on a shelf, on a head, in the real world. Every collection started from what the material wanted to do, not from a flat file that would fall apart in production.

The Work:
Multiple capsule collections of trim and patch design, plus the slogan and verbal work that gave each drop its hook, including a dedicated Melin Golf line. Each collection had to feel new enough to sell and familiar enough to be unmistakably Melin: a moving target I've now hit across four years of drops.

The Result:
A relationship that's run since 2021 and a string of collections that sell out the same day they drop. The repeat hire is its own proof, brands don't keep handing you the keys to their identity unless the last collection moved.